I fully endorse people's rights to be loose cannons, and not follow a
"straight party line".
However, having read an earlier Utne article by the author of this book
on the same topic, I think his view of liberal environmentalists is both
patronizing, and lacking in real understanding of environmental issues.

I admit that I don't think the author was that clear on what he would
support or oppose politically. I think he was more generally pro-
environment, than Bush's lot (which wouldn't be hard).
I have seen some other examples. He mentions a wife of a petroleum
company executive who homeschools her eight kids. She was once a
petroleum company manager but says, "I feel like my kids are getting a
real childhood." My mother who taught school for 38 years and now
designs and promotes math curricula at the elementary school level, is
NOT a big fan of homeschooling. And her objections are NOT about
"socialization" so much, because she thinks kids actually get more
socialization from church, family, and neighborhood than school. But
she feels very strongly that homeschooling often means a very poor
education and that problems like dyslexia can too easily go
undiagnosed in that environment. She feels that even if the parent is
a certified teacher than homeschooling is not a better education. She
doesn't recommend it unless it's the only alternative to an extremely
long commute, or a "moving around" situation where the child ends up
in multiple classrooms a year.
As a former kid, I also feel that the public school I went to was
better than Catholic school. And I try to make it very clear that my
preference WAS about the quality of education, not the religion (I
went to cathechism for years afterward willingly.), nor because of
nuns with rulers or anything like that (this was Vatican II).
Several of the listed "crunchy cons" expressed distrust for the
"hysterical environmentalists" but still made comments about not
wanting to destroy small town America, or turn all the farms and
forests into suburbs.
One said that he thought environmentalists were just "conservatives
who want to eat fresh vegetables".
To me this in a classic example of rejecting a philosophy without
truly understanding its positions. Basically I feel like he enjoys
some of the things that have been popularized in part by by the
ecology movement such as organic vegetables and walkable communities,
but really doesn't *get* the larger concerns of environmentalists.
Another thing he said that undermined his credibility was that he
enjoyed listening to both Garrison Keillor and Rush Limbaugh. A number
of conservative commentators, I could have rolled with, but Limbaugh's
constant disrespect for logic and costant use of broad ad hominem
attacks on "liberals", "environuts" and "feminazis" (most of which are
created him by taking the most cherry picked outrageous and out of
context examples and twisting in his own signature way), just didn't
help his arguement. Especially considering how much he mentioned old
fashioned civil discourse as another "crunchy con" core value.
Basically the best case that can be made from these crunchy cons, in
my view is that common stereotypes of liberals and conservatives don't
always hold up. Basically these crunchy cons are political palecons
and often religious traditionalists, whose lifestyle choices don't fit
the "Walmart shopping, beer guzzling, and NASCAR loving" stereotype.

One notable thing about crunchy cons is that they recognise that the
original counterculture of the 1960s was not liberal or even
radical in many ways.
Beats Kerouac and Rexroth were Catholics, albeit of a type that
frequently acknowledged even mortal sins as a form of grace, following
on from Julian of Norwich in Revelations of Divine Love. Many
hippies were very fascinated by highly traditional forms of
Christianity and/or practitioners thereof, primarily because they saw
in the Distributists especially a working model of living "back to the
land". It is from this root that cruncy conservatives seek to build
a locally based society based around family-centric work and
education.
In fact, the communalism of the hippies contrasted with the radical
individualism and radical egalitarianism of the punks of the late
1970s in a very firm manner. People like Rod Dreher and his allies at
Front Porch Republic recognise how the radical break with Western
Civilisation was really created not in the Sixties, but in the late
seventies and eighties as punk and then rap gradually worked their way
into popular consciousness.

Yes. And the devolution of the family was well on its way to becoming
the frightful mess it is today.

I would argue that the radical individualism and radical
egalitarianism punk thought it was bringing in has been co-opted by a
consumeristic society that feeds off of these desires and the
egalitarianism is only the fact that this consumerism is equally
distributed between all sexes.

.....and the families that are raised today have a new god to worship
with their very marketable bodies and minds - materialism.